Coronavirus

[MGMcAnick]

From BSG's link:

Trump said in the documentary. "He joined the great gold rush, he did fantastically well, he loved this country."

As Columbo used to say, "Just one more question".
Where was the gold rush in 1885?

Unfortunately this does show that Mrs Mc has more in common with the Drumpf family than she's likely to want to admit. Her maternal grandfather participated in the 1890 Cripple Creek Colorado rush, and her paternal grandMOTHER died in the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.

Her grandfather was so broke after a month in Cripple Creek that he had his wife send him cash for the train ticket back to Kansas. PayPal hadn't been invented yet. At least the mail got through.

Did you know that Cripple Creek was the first town to be wired with Nicola Tesla's new fangled DC electricity? Someone there must have made some money.

In the 1950s and '60s it was largely a ghost town. Houses could be bought for a small portion of their unpaid taxes. I know of one family who got one for $12.50. Today CC is a gambling mecca, with the main street lined with casinos. When casino gambling became legal in 1991, a vacant lot could be bought for $1/2 a million.

[rubato]

AC technology. Tesla is famous for promoting AC (which was far better than DC).

[Scooter]

Tonight at the grocery store, people were buying 2 or 3 100-roll packages of toilet paper, and I'm thinking, are they preparing for a nuclear winter?

[Joe Guy]

I'm not the sharpest bulb in the drawer and I'm a few french fries short of a brickload so I can't understand why people are buying huge loads of toilet paper. Are they expecting a family diarrhea attack? If you're going to be paranoid about COVID-19, to me it would make more sense for people stock up on some foods with a long shelf life, extra prescription drugs if needed (if possible) and things like soap and other things you use daily. If the idea is to not go outside often, buy more stuff online, use grocery delivery services and wear a bag over your head.

I haven't heard of any toilet paper manufacturers shutting down. What's up with that?

[BoSoxGal]

Apparently some folks are worried about having enough TP on hand if they get quarantined for weeks like the folks were in Wuhan - but most of the buying of TP is a panicked response to the news reports of panicked TP buying. It’s going viral!

[Joe Guy]

Apparently some folks are worried about having enough TP on hand if they get quarantined for weeks like the folks were in Wuhan - but most of the buying of TP is a panicked response to the news reports of panicked TP buying. It’s going viral!

I think you're right. It doesn't take much to cause a panic at at time like this and if you watch enough TV and you are the worrying type, you probably can find all kinds of reasons to be anxious. Especially at a time like this when people have little faith in our government.

[BoSoxGal]

[Guinevere]

Bwahahaha! I forgot to quote the funny post! Although Sue's was a little bit funny. Is there anyone here who wasn’t born in the 70s? I think crackpot is our resident baby of the board and I’m pretty sure even he is that old?

This of course is precisely why I’m worried about all of us - we’re a bunch of high(er) risk geezers!

The data shows that the risk doesn’t significantly increase until 60-65, or if you’re immuno-compromised. I’m neither, and definitely not a “geezer.” You can call yourself a geezer if you like, but I’m pretty sure CP, dats, you, wesw, and I, are the younger posters here.

Ironically, the several people I know who got it - including a client, a client’s client, and a client’s daughter- are in their early 40s. Symptoms have been very mild, mostly cold-like.

[TPFKA@W]

Geezer, what an interesting word to express some deep seeded bigotry. I am 60 and 1/2. I am guessing I could run rings around your ass on my worst day and your best day. I have worked an active job for more than 30 years and it has kept me from collecting fat as I have noted desk jobs like lawyering tend to cause.

I live 2 miles from an elementary school has our 2nd case of corona. They have closed the school for the next 2 weeks, yet the children are at the local stores and other places where people congregate, so I don't really know why they bothered. It is a huge inconvenience to working parents. I understand they are not letting the teachers take their PTO for this. What a mess. I have a collection of little hand sanitizers I have obtained over the years and was thinking of posting them on marketplace for an exorbitant price and see who is stupid enough to pay it. It is all quite vexing.

[Guinevere]

The curves in the graph in this article demonstrate why it’s important to get out ahead of the virus:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/ ... inst-time/

This one, here:



Quarantine isn’t vacation, and it’s a shame those people aren’t taking it seriously. There are strict rules that are supposed to be observed, and if they are not, then yeah, the effect of the quarantine is significantly compromised. There are 40+ cases in MA. Fully 1/3 of those (or more) came from 4 travelers to Italy who didn’t take the precautions seriously and then got sick. And in the interim, infected a bunch of others, including indirectly. The one China-related illness took appropriate measures immediately and (as far as DPH can tell) hasn’t infected anyone.

As for not being able to take PTO, if the school district is closed, they should be paying that staff and not making them discharge any leave at all. It’s going to be expensive, but an epidemic will be worse. We are working on a ton of related legal issues right now - lots to consider, depending on how it all goes.

[MajGenl.Meade]

So we've got these unrefundable tickets . . . to the UK for 4 days, early June; on to USA for three weeks; thence to France for two weeks; and back to the UK again for a week+ and return to Jo'burg.

Urk???

Margaretta is not worried about the virus, though she enters the killing field of 70 y.o. June 15. I'm fine because I'm only 69.5 then. I'm glad we're not booked to Italy or Israel (it's those useless countries beginning with capital "I" again).

SA has seven people tested positive - all associated with a trip to Italy. There still seems to be plenty of TP on the shelves.

[Gob]

Stealing that!

[Gob]

Geezer, what an interesting word to express some deep seeded bigotry.

Geezer is a light hearted term of approval in the UK...

Geezer
A geezer is a descriptive word in the UK which is used to define a mans characteristics. A geezer will be found usually out side a pub with a pint in his hand on match day. They commonly like football, scrapping, beer, tea, tits, and Barry white. Geezers often acknowledge other geezers by a greeting each other by saying geezer followed by a nod and a thumbs up.

Nigel: Alright geezer how much is a can of red stripe
Charles: For you nothing my friend because your a top geezer
Nigel: arr Cheers geeze *nod* *thumbs up*

Charles: *nod* *thumbs up*

But...

Originally, a geezer seems to have been ‘someone who went around in disguise’. The word probably represents a dialectal pronunciation of the now obsolete guiser ‘someone wearing a masquerade as part of a performance, mummer’. This was a derivative of guise (13th c.), which, together with disguise (14th c.), goes back ultimately to prehistoric Germanic *wīsōn, ancestor of archaic English wise ‘manner

Round these parts we have "guise dancers"..

[Gob]

At the risk of being a "three post nutbag"...

This should cull some, put bleach in the shallow end etc...

In Greece, calls are growing for the Greek Orthodox Church to listen to scientists on the issue of how best to deal with Covid-19 following its refusal to suspend ecclesiastical services and sacred rites such as Holy Communion.

Debate over the church’s controversial stance intensified after its governing body debunked any suggestion that the novel virus could be transmitted when worshippers participate in shared rituals like Communion.

In a statement Monday, the Holy Synod announced “with a sense of responsibility” that it would continue to hold services and conduct the sacrament despite public health fears raised by the issue of shared chalices.

“For the members of the church, attendance of the Divine Eucharist and the shared Cup of Life, of course cannot be a cause of transmission of illness,” the body of senior clerics said in the statement. “Believers of all ages know that attending communion, even in the midst of a pandemic, is both a practical affirmation of self-surrender to the Living God and a potent manifestation of love, which vanquishes every human and perhaps justified fear.”

Medical authorities, including the federation representing doctors’ unions, have decried what they have described as the obscurantism of clerics invoking religious belief as a bulwark against the virus.

Possibly because of its influence as one of the most powerful institutions in a country where church and state have yet to be separated, the centre-right government has been slow to condemn the stance.

But with most congregations drawing older Greeks, the controversial issue is increasingly being raised.

When asked during an interview on state-run TV, what Greeks should do, Dora Bakoyannis, the former foreign minister and sister of prime minister Kyrakos Mitsotakis, said science had spoken and had to be listened to.

“I am a person who listens to experts and experts are saying very specific things, such as this virus is transmitted through human contact, through saliva etc.,” she told the station. “Science has spoken,” she added welcoming the news that some bishops were considering conducting open-air services in the run-up to Orthodox Easter.

But while the church has also warned faithful against kissing icons or clerics’ hands - long held traditions in eastern Orthodoxy - some say it is not enough.

Elias Mossialos, professor of health policy at the London School of Economics, argued in an article written for the Greek daily Ta Nea, that the time had come for faithful to follow services on TV. “Vulnerable groups of believers who are the majority of those who go to church,” he wrote, referring to the older generation, “should watch services on television and Holy Communion should stop for the duration of the epidemic.”

[Big RR]

This is pretty timely; I sing as a section leader in the choir at a Greek Orthodox cathedral; yesterday the bishop gave a talk about the Covid situation and said something like "we should listen to the science, but more importantly we should listen to our hearts in deciding what our religious practices should be" (it's pretty close to this, but he has a thick accent so I am not certain. since over half the people in the cathedral were likely over 80, I thought this was almost as bad as Trump suggesting infected people could go to work. It seems this is pretty endemic to the GO church; of course I'm only up in the choir loft so I'm not that concerned, but sharing a communal spoon (which is the form they use for communion) seems to be a real problem to me.

I recall hearing a minister from a church that uses a common cup for communion stating that there has never been a proven case of any disease transmission through the communion cup--even in times of serious epidemics. True, the cups are silver and/or gold and have some germicidal properties (but not much), but how this would affect the germs of the backwash of the person before you entered into the cup is completely beyond me. It's just idiocy.

[BoSoxGal]

Oh for shit’s sake, any reason you can drum up to attack BSG - thanks so much Guin and @w, glad things are right back to normal!

I work with the elderly every fucking day, I was raised by my grandmother and grew up among the elderly - I have zero bias or contempt for the elderly, the term was used in affection and FUCK YOU!

eta: By the way @w, it’s deep SEATED, not seeded. Just so you don’t go around looking like a moron. And by the way, only an asshole goes out of her way to mention that she can run circles around someone living with a fucking disability - hard to believe you are in the nursing profession. Feel free to unload with all the usual nasty venomous attacks on me - you’re on ignore and will be now forevermore - you have nothing to contribute here that is worth my time.

By the way bitches, when you’ve been informed by your physicians that you can expect a shortened lifespan due to your chronic illness, aging takes on a whole different aspect. I can tell from the way you both responded here - and in other threads over the years when the subject’s come up - that you have the typical feminine sensitivity over your amassing age and wrinkles - get over yourselves and be glad to be alive for fuck’s sake. And yeah, as far as sociological terms go, you’re elderly at 65 and both of you are well on your way. Facts is facts. For fuck’s sake.

[Guinevere]

BSG - I declined to be called a geezer. I also noted you are one of the younger posters here. I certainly don’t think of you as a geezer, either, but if you want to refer to yourself that way, that’s your choice. How, please, is any of that an attack??

As for my “advancing age,” I have fully embraced my 50s, including all of the various changes, including that I don’t give a flying fuck what people think about me, I’m staying true to myself. Some of the 50-something world is wonderful. Some if it is challenging. All of it is better than the alternative.

[Guinevere]

Meade - I would check with your airlines about flights if you want to reschedule, as I read that some are allowing changes without fees.

Is it too late to purchase travel insurance?

[TPFKA@W]

OH DEAR. I had no idea you had a "fucking disability". It certainly explains a lot. Try some KY jelly.

I too work among the elderly and I respect them enough not to use pejoratives (I hope I am spelling and using it correctly, you know how we morons are) when speaking about them. I expect that you pat them on the head and say, "There's a good old geezer, let's change the TV channel and not watch that Fox news." Changing the channel from their preferred source is abuse by the way. It is alarming that people like you are in care positions.

Carry on.

[BoSoxGal]

Just FYI, I’m no longer reading your posts either, Guin. I’ll be lucky to make it to elderly and as a consequence I‘m guarding my time far more carefully these days. I have zero tolerance for the bitchy mean girls judgmental bullshit anymore, sorry not sorry.